FloodMind: Valuing the impact of floods on mental health

Traditional flood risk strategies focus on the costs of damage to property and infrastructure, but we know that flooding also has severe impacts on people’s mental health. The FloodMind project was set up to address this gap: to understand the costs and benefits of interventions that protect mental health even when flooding cannot be avoided.

FloodMind was designed to lay the intellectual foundations for better decision-making in the flooding and mental health space. In the past it has been difficult to make the funding case for ‘non-structural’ interventions that do not necessarily prevent flooding but do reduce the incidence of poor mental health after a flood. The reasons are that: the causal chain between flood impact and mental health diagnosis has not been fully mapped out; the economic costs of different mental health conditions have not been formally calculated, and there has not been a tool available to combine that data into a decision-support framework.

FloodMind has made significant progress on all three of these key areas, enabling the next phase of work to produce a tool to help decision-makers understand what interventions work to protect the mental health of people who have been flooded and how much should be spent on them.

About Matt Georges

Matt is the founder and director of Orbital Applied Economics, a specialist environmental economics and decision support consultancy. He undertakes cost-benefit analysis, quantitative decision analysis and economics training for non-economists. He has over 20 years’ experience in environmental policy, economics and regulation in both the public and private sectors and sits on the UK REACH Independent Scientific Expert Pool, providing advice on the socio-economic analysis underpinning decisions to limit or ban the use of certain substances due to their impact on the environment and human health. He previously worked at the English Environment Agency, managing a team which developed novel modelling techniques and valuation methods. He sat on the Agency's Large Projects Review Group, quality assuring flood risk schemes between £10-100m in value and has worked on a wide range of projects from analysing waste crime to cost-benefit analysis in major industries, such as iron and steel, and oil refining.

About Dr Rebecca McDonald

Rebecca is an Associate Professor in Economics. She conducts research in behavioural economics using experimental methods. She studies how individuals value outcomes that do not have a clear market price, including health, online privacy, and the risk of fatality. In doing so, she explores how risk and delay affect the value of outcomes, and examines the stability of preferences within and across contexts. Her research is interdisciplinary and impact-focussed. She held an ESRC New Investigator grant exploring the role of delay in the value of a life year, and she was part of the team that authored a government-commissioned scoping review into the evidence base for valuing safety. Her academic research has been published in top outlets including the European Economic Review, Management Science, Risk Analysis, and Social Science and Medicine.